She had arrived home with her mind in a riot. She might have read through the ‘Pillow Talk’ pages of her letter project, or started the next section, titled ‘Safe Trespass’ — it was to focus on the clandestine quality of letters — but both would have required an intellectual effort that, in her current state, was beyond her. Making a fair copy of a hard-to-read letter was a task with clear and limited boundaries, it was totally absorbing, and exactly what she needed after meeting Mark Asher.

As to whether she would keep the rendezvous next week, she was far from certain, but that would not stop her from the very pleasant pastime of entertaining the possibility.

She took her time with the copying, given the knotted handwriting, she had no choice, and gradually the extraordinary events of the day shifted to a softer beat. She assumed that Leonard was downstairs in his chair, wrapped in his after-work cardigan, his feet up, a Scotch in one hand, the newspaper in the other. It was such a fond and familiar image, one of so many that cemented their long relationship. Their meals were another; and it occurred to her, as it never had before, that their meals provided a perfect illustration of their marriage.

When they had company, she would sit at one end of the dining table, Leonard would sit at the other, and their guests would sit in between; she and Leonard would conduct the evening in a faultless duet, while at the same time exchanging a private commentary in their own subliminal language. When it was just the two of them, they ate at a small table in the kitchen. They enjoyed eating like this, like nursery meals in the books she read as a child. Nursery meals, nursery relationship. But what was wrong with that? It was safe, it was secure, it was full of history, and it had been full of love. As for sex, it was not something women like her were brought up to want; and not knowing what she had missed out on, she’d not felt its absence. Of course sex was everywhere these days: on billboards, in TV advertisements, rocking along in pop songs, at the movies. But she saw films of people climbing Everest, of trekkers crossing the Sahara, and while she was interested, even fascinated, it did not make her want to climb mountains or cross deserts. And the same could be said about sex.

Until today.

Sitting at a window table in a café with a strange man who couldn’t stop talking, she recognised a hot, jagged stirring deep within her that was unambiguously sexual. What did she know about her husband? That he had slept with other people, he had slept with men. It had not, in the end, changed the way she felt about him.

And if she were to do the same?